The Dow is currently up

.DJI 25,329.721 +142.022 +0.564%

About the DOW:
The Dow is a combined average of how 30 of the largest US listed companies have traded today. It takes the market cap and price into account for it’s weighted average. It is a great metric to show how the US markets have preformed on a given day.

History:The Dow is named after Charles and his associate Ed Jones. The Dow average is a price-weighted index and the value of the Dow is not the actual average of the prices of its tracked stocks, but rather the total of the stock prices divided by a divisor, which changes whenever one of the component stocks has a split or dividend. The Dow probably the most popular benchmark for tracking overall US stock market activity & exchange health.